I read a book at least twenty to twenty-five years ago. I don’t remember the name of the book or the characters or the author, but I do think the author was female.
Anyway, the story was told in the first person by a teenage girl. Her people lived on a spaceship but young people didn’t automatically get to stay with the ship, or it would become overcrowded. When you reaced a certain age, or maybe it was once a “year” you had to leave the ship and go to ground on a planet. If you survived for (I don’t remember how long) you could come back to the ship. It was as if the community was culling their young, and only taking the best.
I can’t remember how the story turned out, if the girl went “home” or if she stayed with a guy I think she hooked up with.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it tho. Came to mind immediately upon reading the OP.
Good job, Little Nemo!
BTW, the other novelt hat came to mind was George Zabrowski’s Macrolife, but going dirtside wasn’t a rite of passage and only one character, a guy named John, did it.
Rite of Passage it is! Thank you Little Nemo and Snowboarder Bo both.
I do remember wanting to like the book but finding it didn’t really make me want to return to it. But I was reading another story that reminded me of it and decided to try and find it. If I read it again it may be very different, as it’s been so long and I’ve aged.
I know the book’s been ID’ed but I wanted to mention that is very similar to what the Quarian do in Mass Effect. They live on a fleet and send their young people on a “Pilgrimage” as a right of passage where they go out into the Galaxy to find technology or knowledge that can be useful to the fleet.
There’s also Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. But the protagonist in that book was a teenage boy so I figured it wasn’t the one Baker was remembering.
That was one of my favortie Heinlein juveniles. Liked them all, even Rocketship Galileo, the weakest. The latter was the first book I read as a kid in which I remember a character specifically being identified as Jewish.
Not really. Both were new waver stuff that took a while to build a solid audience; RoP was, well, a pretty prime slice of synthetic old-school Heinlein.
It’s a matter of remembering that what’s appreciated now is not necessarily what was appreciated in its original era.
Well, the Anthony Villiers novels are also pretty darn good. Very wry, witty, droll, and also clever and insightful.
(And if you like them, you’ll like the Drake Maijstral novels by Walter Jon Williams…which take the same basic tone – comedies of manners – and actually do the job better! The student excels the master!)
Alas, some of Panshin’s more recent efforts have been…ah…well… Comfortably forgettable.
Still, the Villiers novels! Delightful! Highest recommendation; I re-read these every couple of years with never-decreasing delight.
I don’t mean this as a joke…but what more recent efforts?
I just checked Panshin’s bibliography. He wrote Rite of Passage in 1968 and the Anthony Villiers trilogy in 1968 and 1969. (1968 was also the year he wrote the non-fiction Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis - it was definitely a career-making year for him.)
And since then, virtually nothing. He co-wrote one more novel, Earth Magic, with his wife Cory in 1973. He wrote a handful of short stories in the early seventies but then stopped. He continued to write some essays and reviews but those stopped in the nineties.
Panshin is still alive but he apparently hasn’t written anything in twenty years. And virtually all the fiction he wrote was apparently written in a single two year period that ended forty-five years ago.
You’re correct that Panshin’s literary career is pretty much confined to the four ca-1969 novels, despite a few desultory efforts later.
However, he (and Cory) turned out a fairly steady series of critical works, one of which won a Hugo, and while he hasn’t published anything formally for a while, he’s written new entries for his website until at least a couple of years ago. Not that there’s much point in reading them; it’s nearly all older material (as written), older material rewritten or updated, or new material comprised of much the same thoughts and subjects as the old material.
As a side note, does anyone know whatever happened to The Universal Pantograph? I heard at one point that it was completed but he never could find a publisher for it. Seems that it would have shown up somewhere by now, even if only on Amazon or something.
So these people are traveling to find a new planet to colonize, correct? But it’s going to take such a long time to get where they’re going that whole generations are born, grow up, live their lives and die on the ship.
But then every year or so they stop for a month to drop off their teenagers for the Rite of Passage on a planet that the teen can survive on (gravity, atmosphere, etc.). Can’t they set up a colony on one of these planets? (And do they put all of their teenagers on the same planet together each year – scattered, of course – or does each kid get his or her own planet?)
And there’s a passage where they go down to a planet to visit some folks and all these ship-raised kids hate the wind and the bugs and the uneven ground and the wind and the food grown in dirt and the surf that won’t just stay still and the wind. Why don’t they set up a colony there, if they already know those people?
IIRC the Shippies were not looking to colonise a planet. Their role was more to supervise the scattered colony planets and to facilitate trade etc. I believe they considered themselves superior to the "Mudworlders " and in fact exacted harsh justice upon them.
The children were all let loose on the same planet for their test , considering interplanetary distances .